She lived in a cottage, made with bones
Her garden, ringed by teeth,
All from the shipwrecked sailors floating
In from the hidden reef,
You couldn’t see when the tide was high
But the rocks lay down, and tore,
Down where the tide swept in the keels
That had sailed too close to shore.

The bodies were floating in for days
When the storm would calm, abate,
Bloodied and torn, their sailor ways
Were left to unfeeling fate,
The crows would gather and crowd the beach
As they ripped each corpse to shreds,
Tearing the flesh regardless, whether
The man was alive, or dead.

The beach turned into a boneyard, under
A blue and perfect sky,
With nobody willing to ask it,
The obvious question, ‘Why?’
But she in the boneyard cottage knew
When she harvested the beach,
For every ship, as her cottage grew
Left the bones, so white and bleached.

And there on the hearth of the kitchen lay
A skull that had been her own,
The one true love of her darling years
Who had promised to build their home,
He denied her plea and had gone to sea,
Was caught in a sudden storm,
Came rolling over the reef one day
With blood on his uniform.

And now, whenever a distant sail
Appears from near or far,
She runs on out to the bluff and screams
To God, ‘Wherever you are.’
She summons up from the depths a storm
With wind and a blinding rain,
And giant rollers that head for shore
That carry her lover’s pain.

It’s then that the skull on the hearth lights up,
A glow from its empty eyes,
And then a terrible screaming from
A mouth, that had once been sighs,
She knows he wants her to save the ship
She’s luring onto the rocks,
But whispers a curse at the fatal rip
‘On all dead men, a pox!’

David Lewis Paget